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New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

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Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "me" you mean "the voters" then yes of course. What was that Russian proverb Ronald Regan was always so found of? Trust but verify? The verify part is very, very important. Blind trust with no accountability is totally insane. There has to come a point, during the lives of the people who have to be held accountable for what they've done, that what they've done comes to light. Or how do you propose we hold them…

You pick representatives, and they are shown the effectiveness of programs, because they are the ones who vote for the programs. This isn't about you, or me, or any individual, that's not how this country works. Some things that are not very popular are absolutely necessary nonetheless.

> You pick representatives, and they are shown the effectiveness of programs, because they are the ones who vote for the programs.

They aren't always given the information either. Recall Diane Feinstein being quite displeased about being lied to recently. And we still have to elect "them" on the basis of something. By what process is a corrupt politician supposed to be held accountable if the fact of their corruption is a government secret?

> Some things that are not very popular are absolutely necessary nonetheless.

How do you propose to ensure that only the "absolutely necessary" things are occurring?

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#282
post #30

Looking at the comments in support of the NSA here makes me suspect an astroturfing campaign is happening. Edit: I should add that my suspicion came from noticing that the vast majority of the comments when this was first posted seemed aligned in favor of the NSA's mission. It wasn't the presence of pro-NSA comments that was interesting but rather that these opinions were the overwhelming majority. This is, of course…

It's interesting to note that it's not just comments that can be manipulated but also the stories that are upvoted.

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to him, you accused him of saying something he didn't.

No, I didn't, I rephrased what he wrote in terms that more obviously illustrate the absurdity of the argument he's making.

Some times when you rephrase an argument, it becomes a different argument.

Some times when this happens, we call it a strawman argument.

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pick representatives, and they are shown the effectiveness of programs, because they are the ones who vote for the programs. This isn't about you, or me, or any individual, that's not how this country works. Some things that are not very popular are absolutely necessary nonetheless.

> You pick representatives, and they are shown the effectiveness of programs, because they are the ones who vote for the programs. They aren't always given the information either. Recall Diane Feinstein being quite displeased about being lied to recently. And we still have to elect " them " on the basis of something. By what process is a corrupt politician supposed to be held accountable if the fact of their corrupti…

If you know about it, it's not secret, so you're in a losing position of being unable to come up with an example of corruption the public doesn't know about.

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I didn't, I rephrased what he wrote in terms that more obviously illustrate the absurdity of the argument he's making.

Some times when you rephrase an argument, it becomes a different argument. Some times when this happens, we call it a strawman argument.

No, we call it a strawman if it's not an accurate equivalent. If it's accurate, it's not a strawman, such as in this situation.

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some times when you rephrase an argument, it becomes a different argument. Some times when this happens, we call it a strawman argument.

No, we call it a strawman if it's not an accurate equivalent. If it's accurate, it's not a strawman, such as in this situation.

Your reply had literally no connection to any of the words in my post except, presumably, in your imagination. Can you lay out its accuracy for us? Obviously we're curious how you made the jumps in logic you did, and it appears you left some words out.

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You pick representatives, and they are shown the effectiveness of programs, because they are the ones who vote for the programs. They aren't always given the information either. Recall Diane Feinstein being quite displeased about being lied to recently. And we still have to elect " them " on the basis of something. By what process is a corrupt politician supposed to be held accountable if the fact of their corrupti…

If you know about it, it's not secret, so you're in a losing position of being unable to come up with an example of corruption the public doesn't know about.

Don't be silly. All of the corruption we know about now is an example of corruption the public didn't know about before it was published. The problem is we need to learn about it while there is still time to do something about it. We can't stop it if we only learn about it after it has already happened.

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know about it, it's not secret, so you're in a losing position of being unable to come up with an example of corruption the public doesn't know about.

Don't be silly. All of the corruption we know about now is an example of corruption the public didn't know about before it was published. The problem is we need to learn about it while there is still time to do something about it. We can't stop it if we only learn about it after it has already happened.

The problem with corruption is that we don't know about it soon enough?

Got it.

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#289

Here's a story for you. I'm not a party to any of this. I've done nothing wrong, I've never been suspected of doing anything wrong, and I don't know anyone who has done anything wrong. I don't even mean that in the sense of "I pissed off the wrong people but technically haven't been charged." I mean that I am a vanilla, average, 9-5 working man of no interest to anybody. My geographical location is an accident of my…

Hello.

Re: New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for Cyber Battle

#290
post #25

Everything at the lowest levels needs to be tightened up now. Buffer overflows in trusted code have to go. This means getting rid of the languages with buffer overflow problems. Mostly C and C++. Fortunately we have Go and Rust, plus all the semi-interpreted languages, now, and can do it. We need something that runs Docker-like containers and, all the way down the bare metal, has no unsafe code. We need dumber server…

I wonder, how switching to different programming language would have prevented backdoor in network hardware?

Juz 16 is right that the companies concerned should face criminal prosecution, this is not technological problem and technology cannot (ultimately) solve it.

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